Why does anything matter?
A sunny afternoon. About nap time. Outside of the windows which the midday sun sears through, the city is peaceful, a brief break of quietude except the infrequent and only faintly audible jangling of construction until later towards rush hours. The day is still early, and that my mom will not be home till late smells much of opportunity. Yet I sit there and look out, drooling on the brightness dripping on the verdance outside, trying to take in the hustling humidity and the freedom-promising space of nobody. I lie down — just because I can — and start wondering if anything would change if I fall asleep right now and never wake up. For a startling second that will continue to inundate my brain, I realize I don’t and probably never will matter, just like the roadside tree that will vanish into the dark hole of history once it is severed and removed from human urban planning. It is only a matter of time.
Thoughts like these can be scary and depressing. They thwart our efforts to try to do anything productive, and in severe cases, they can hinder us from performing basic daily tasks. While I do not pretend to be an expert in clinical psychology or existential philosophy, I do want to validate these feelings from the point that I hope someone could have ensured and guided me. Rampant self help articles online do momentarily boost my motivation, but the fundamental existential question remains unresolved. Therefore, I hope to share in this article some of my realizations, things that have helped me get there, and how to be positive and productive again.
The baseline: nothing matters, at least not rationally. If life is miserable, actions are geared towards relieving this preconditioned misery, what am I if not life’s puppet? If I have everything I hoped for — money, status, talent, freedom — or all the resources I thought I needed to do the thing I always wanted, why do I not do it? It does not matter if I do or do not if I know I always can, and no difference will be made between the two for me as long as the other is an open possibility. Regardless, annihilation is all of us’ destination, and nothing will ever last. Belief in one thing will shift to the other as soon as the latest study or report comes out. We say one thing and do another like seasoned nihilists. Nothing seems reliable besides our rational minds which we cling to as our last straw for unity.
But we are bound by being humans, trapped by human emotions, intelligence, irrationality and yet the haunting nostalgia for unity and eternity. Like Gatsby chasing the irretrievable past, we move towards a future that promises the doom, our insignificance and non-existence.
So why beat on?
Nobody argues better for this than the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus. In Myth Of Sisyphus, Camus eloquently argues for living with our inner tensions and dissatisfactions rather than escaping them, either through death or faith. He uses the story of Sisyphus — a Greek mythological figure who is eternally condemned by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it fall down and repeat — to parallel our infinitely fruitless and struggling human life. Yet that is no reason to idle days away. Just like how “each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world” for Sisyphus, our own body, relationships with family and friends, the soil or asphalt or concrete we put our feet on, are themselves colorful. Their collective temporariness is the boundary of our limitless possibilities.
Acknowledging destiny is understandably difficult, but let’s not let it deny the joyful, painful, exciting and exhausting experience this life has to offer us right here, right now. If defiance is what propels us to feel the depression in the first place, what, in Camus’ words, could be more defiant than finding happiness in what is supposed to be a punishment, in value in what is supposed to be meaningless?
Hopeless, mortal, but also dauntless and ambitious, we live. It is all we can do because it is all we have. Our body is always a step ahead of our thoughts which are then later substantiated. The dubiously enlightening and definitely tortuous search for metaphysical liberty entangles our dreams, clouding ourselves with alluringly unattainable promises. The only way to revolt and gain control is to admit your limitations, accept anything and anyone matters, and participate in this complicated but one and only life.
